Cutting Weight

One of the worst things about high school wrestling, for most of my teammates, was cutting weight.

To make wrestling matches competitive, there are weight categories. A competitor will have to step on a scale either right before their match, or the morning of the event—there are even night-before weigh ins for bigger events.

Ostensibly, this makes the sport more fair. Clearly, a 103-pounder isn’t going to beat the best 275-pounder! But like all rules introduced to a sport, it becomes gamified. When the playing field is nearly even, even a tiny advantage can matter a tremendous amount. Therefore, the best wrestlers had little choice but to play that same game if they wanted to win at the highest levels.

I was quite fortunate in this regard: my weight category back then was 160 pounds, very close to my natural weight. Because there were two really good wrestlers underneath that weight, I was able to fill in the gap where I was most needed on my team (and where I could win the wrestle offs to start varsity).

Here I am, wrestling at my natural high school weight: 160 pounds

Still, I learned the basics. Water is very heavy, and you want to step onto the scale when your body isn’t completely filled with water. One way to think about this is that you could grab a heavy bottle of water while you stepped on the scale—this would be completely silly, since you would weigh a pound or two more, even though you were just holding something when you stepped onto the scale.

Similarly, pee weighs something, so it would make sense to pee before stepping onto the scale, not after. It probably also made some sense to eat breakfast after weighing in, and maybe you can see how slippery that slope can get.

Now, there are loads of horror stories about kids cutting weight in high school wrestling, and there have been lots of rules put into place to keep kids safe since I was a kid. That’s not to say that cutting weight is safe, but it’s probably fair to say that it’s done in a safer way now.

After high school wrestling, I eventually found judo and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Weight cutting still happened, but it wasn’t quite as prominent. There were fewer predefined categories and many, many more ad-hoc matches, so in many situations, that five or ten pounds didn’t really matter—you could end up facing the same person no matter what.

Me with Rodrigo, my coach, at a 2003 event where I had to make weight

MMA was different. Here, someone was going to try to punch you in the face or stomp you while you were on the ground (at least, that’s how things started!). Even though judo and BJJ were physically rough sports, I drew a distinction between MMA and grappling competitions.

MMA was called NHB (No Holds Barred) back then, and it was only when it gradually started to shift to a rule set that protected the fighters to some degree that MMA became a household name, or at least the flagship organization did. Nearly everyone I know has heard of the UFC by now.

I helped to make this happen, in a manner of speaking. I had been running a website where I tried to track the history of MMA and combat sports, going all the way back to the ancient Greeks, and through some personal connections, I got a foot in the door with the UFC. We’d get press passes for the event, and the UFC really counted on independent journalists back then.

I had already become friends with Charles McCarthy, who was making his UFC debut. This was June of 2005, and it was UFC 53—perhaps the third or fourth event we had been invited to cover. Now, it was a very big deal for me to know someone who was about to fight in this event, and my friend Aaric and I were incredibly excited.

Here’s Aaric and me at a UFC event where we got to go backstage, interview the fighters, and sit closer to the cage than the high rollers. You can see a lanyard around Aaric’s neck. That’s how we got in to all those spots.

Because I knew Charles and had even trained with him a bit, Aaric and I decided that it would be… er, fun(?) to cut weight alongside Charles. We would show solidarity and make the day go by faster, and none of us would take a sip of water until Charles had made weight the next day.

What followed was a surreal experience, and probably not only due to us being dehydrated.

UFC fighter Evan Tanner joined us for a while inside the sauna. He was in an even worse spot than Charles, who had to cut something like 15 pounds overnight. Evan didn’t seem to be as concerned as Charles, though, and I would watch him step onto the scale the next day, covered in sweat.

Just a few years later, Evan ended up dead after he rode his dirt bike out into the dessert to go camping. I remember hearing stories of Evan’s declining stability and speculation about his mental health floating around on the internet, but I never got to know him. Even still, it was surreal to remember being in that sauna with him when I heard of his death.

Charles eventually did make weight, but it was really difficult for him to get the last few pounds off. Aaric and I lost somewhere around 10 pounds each, and we sipped on our Gatorades and Pedialytes as soon as weigh ins were over. Our experiment in solidarity with Charles was now complete.

Charles lost to David Loiseau, an elite striker who landed a fantastic spinning kick that I swear Aaric and I felt from our press area near the cage. We were still impressed with Charles’s performance, and made sure to tell him so, but I’m sure Charles wasn’t terribly interested in consolation that day.

I’ll have more stories about Aaric, who was a good friend and who helped me to become a more serious journalist at a time when the getting was good. I’ll have more to tell about Charles, too, including the time when I was dragged to see the first Harry Potter movie and the time we rolled on Charles’s hotel room floor.